Tell me about a random unsolved mystery in your life....

I've got one.
When I was around 9 I got a birthday card. It was sent to my home, with my first name and no surname. It was around the time of my birthday. But it clearly wasn't meant for me. It was a purple ronnie card with a poem that was a bit saucy, and the message made no sense to me.
It was tha late 80s so addresses weren't as easy to come by as they are now. Nobody but my family had lived there for over 10 years. It was a small village and the house had a name not a number so quite distinctive.
Who sent the card? Who was it meant for? We thought a practical joke but it was not funny or cruel or followed up by any kind of 'aha' reveal. How did the sender get confused between me and some other person with my first name? With a birthday in the same week as mine?

oops posted too soon. So yes, I think maybe we're able to tune out of these intuitive quirks if we want to?

Also, I know this was mentioned waaay upthread but ChaCha, we used to hear a noise like mice scratching - it sounded like it was coming from my wardrobe and having searched it and found nothing we were a bit perplexed. Eventually realised that birds had built a nest in the gutter above the bedroom window and it was them making all the noise!

A few weeks ago I was cleaning, with my ipod in to motivate me to keep going. I had moved into the bathroom and was just getting the cleaning products out when the sound cut out in my earphones and I heard a woman's voice, quite faintly, say something like 'I hate that song.'

The only explanation I could come up with was electrical interference maybe?

When I was a teenager and I was left alone in the house at night, I could see lights, almost like soft spotlights on two faces on a poster on my wall. I turned the light off in my room but the faces stayed illuminated. I blocked the poster every which way but the light was still there. This was shortly before I started to suffer hypnogogic symptoms though, so I think the lights were coming from my mind, they weren't really there. And why the spirit world would light up the faces of Lee Sharpe and Ryan Giggs on my wall I have no idea!

It's taken me aaages to read this thread but I've enjoyed every minute of it! I love a good spooky mystery and went to bed with the shivers last night after reading some of these but equally I love hearing possible explanations for them - such as associating being carried down the stairs as a baby with flying and the low buzz a landline might emit before it rings. Although I am mostly non-woo and believe in rational explanations, I do believe we have a six sense - maybe intuition? A few of you have mentioned seeibg somebody's lookalike and then seeing the real person shortly afterwards - this ALWAYS used to happen to me. I was so shocked to read about other posters experiencing it. Sometimes it was horrible because I'd see the doppelganger of someone I didn't like and would spend the rest of the day dreading their appearance. In fact it was always a horrible experience for me because I felt like a freak. I know this is going to sound weird but I think I was actually able to turn it off. I haven't had it for years and am so glad.

Waves at The Victorian and JulietBravoJuliet, I live in LE and there used to be a bunker in my garden.

What does the washing machine do with all the fucking socks.

I have remembered a really sad one - we were on holiday in Ireland when I was about 8 or 9 and on a hike along cliff tops somewhere in Cork or Kerry.

We saw a woman coming towards us with long brown hair and dressed in ordinary smart clothes & jacket rather than hiking gear. She was sobbing and crying, obviously very distressed. My dad asked if we could do anything to help, she said no.

We carried on in the opposite direction, but it was pretty clear we were all thinking the same thing - that she was about to go and throw herself off the cliff. Perhaps my parents alerted somebody when we got to the village at the bottom of the hill, I don't know. I just remember how sad it felt, and have often wondered if she was ok and what had happened to her.

LadyEmma, you have to follow this up. (and come back and tell us)

These are fascinating and some of them have given me goosebumps! I have two for you:

When I was very little (7 or younger), I took my wristwatch off before bed one night and put it on my bedside table. As I then reached to turn out the light, I knocked my watch on to the floor. I would have had to get out of bed to retrieve it, so I decided to leave it until morning. However, in the morning, it was nowhere to be found. In fact, I never saw it again! There was carpet on the floor, so no cracks for it to have fallen down, and nowhere else it could feasibly have gone. I was half convinced that the Borrowers had taken it - I was into those books at around that time!

The second one occurred when I was in my mid twenties. I was walking through a crowded Edinburgh Waverley station, on my way to catch a train. I was listening to music through headphones at the time. Suddenly, I heard the voice of a young woman, sounding absolutely terrified, screaming 'Help me! Somebody please help me!'. I ripped my headphones out of my ears, trying to identify which direction the voice was coming from, then realised I couldn't hear it anymore, and nobody around me was reacting at all. This was before the days of MP3 players, so I would have been listening to a cd (one I'd listened to many times before, although I can no longer remember what it was), and my CD player did not have a radio on it. The voice was incredibly clear, and I was completely convinced that what I had heard had nothing to do with the music, and was somewhat freaked out.

Also, men are sometimes kept for forced labour.

p.s. LadyEmma you mention you don't feel the same as it was a man shouting. Hopefully it's nothing and we'll all laugh about this sometime when it's been checked properly and a neighbour has been found who had locked himself in the basement. However, just say this was another of those awful cases, who is to say the man is alone?

I really feel LadyEmma should make that call sooner rather than later. Just be completely honest - someone was shouting from the basement that they were locked in, the police took the word of whoever answered the door and didn't check the basement. You aren't satisfied with that response. If, just if, someone is locked in there why wait several days more? The police work over bank holidays.

I've something that I've never solved. Living in a new council house, me and hubby just going off to sleep up stairs heard a loud bang and hurried down stairs to see what it was. A dimpled pint glass which had been standing on a glass coffee table,(which was intergrated in the curved settee), was on its side. How did this happen? No pets, a baby upstairs in her cot. You could n't move the glass at all to fall on its side. They are wide and quite heavy, and this was on a glass surface. Its a simple thing but I can,t explain it.

LadyEmma please please do it.

Although the likelihood is an innocent explanation, the facts really do stack up otherwise. Your phone call could be the difference between someone being held against their will and liberty.

Please report back as well.

DM wrote her parents seperate Christmas cards one year as her GF was in a hospital terminally ill. When she went to post them her GF's was missing. Later that evening she had a call to say that he had died. I was a baby, DF was at work and nobody else could have touched it. She never found it.

Younguest DS is now 30. When he was 8 or 9 he could suddenly say any word backward instantly, without having to think or work it out. He could do this in English and Spanish. Maybe this is something others can do?
I'd never come across it so was surprised as no one else in the family has had this ability. After a few months he couldn't do it any longer.

Around that time we moved into a rented apartment. In the kitchen there was hanging a sort of long banner with a very long grocery list in German.
No one in the family speaks a word of German and we had never known anyone from there. DS took one look at the list and translated to us what each item was. He'd read the word out loud in German and then he'd tell us in Spanish or English.
After that he could say the whole long list in German without looking and in the correct order. His brothers found it highly entertaining. He also lost that ability after a few months.

Also, when he was around 3 he suddenly could identify any dinosaur and say the name correctly. No one in the family had been remotely interested in dinosaurs so he wasn't getting it from any of us. He kept the interest up until about age 6 or 7

Some years ago, DH lost his wedding ring. It was around Christmas time.

A few months later, in May, he was standing in our living room, chatting with a friend, and saw something silver in the grass. It was his ring.

He must've mowed the grass during that time.

Nutella - when the "phenomenon" of psychic dogs is tested properly ie tests are repeated and randomised so that nobody in the house knows when the owner is setting off/due home, results are no better than chance. People tend to take notice of the times the dog looks out of the window etc and the owner appears shortly after, and ignore/discount the times the dog does it and the owner doesn't appear.

However everyone thinks its different with THEIR dog :)

When I was home last Christmas I nipped down to visit my pal who lives 2 blocks away from my parents house, it's only a couple minutes walk. Mum said my dog moved from infront of the fire to stand looking out the patio doors and she made a comment wondering if I had just said goodbye to my friend on the way out of the house, 2 minutes later I appeared around the corner. Mum thinks my dog knew I was on my way home. Of course it is possible he heard me as the houses aren't very far apart but I would be surprised if he did as it is still a good distance.

My cousin's MIL can 'speak' to animals, my cousin has 2 dogs and she knew something was wrong with one of them but couldn't figure out what, she took the dogs to her MIL and she was able to tell her that the dog had a pain in her tail. Off to the vet for an x-ray and turns out the dog had caught her tail somewhere and fractured it. We rescued our dog and sent her a photo to see if she could tell us anything and she said she got a lot of images of a man being taken away on a stretcher and an ambulance. We had assumed he had been an elderly persons dog as he was out on the street and the address on his chip was empty, so made sense that the family didn't want to or couldn't take him on and left him.

dogs knowing when their owners are coming home is not necessarily explained by picking up on subtle cues from people in the house.

my dog would lie in a spot by the front door 20 minutes before my (now ex)h would get home. This could be 5pm, 10pm or 2am and I would never know (note he is now my exh) but the dog gave me a clue. I used to know to put some dinner on (yes, even at 2am. I was a mug back then and took my MIL's shitty advice that to win back your husband you should be up before him, go to bed after and make his home as heaven, with food ready for him. I was a fool then and I left him after five years of this crap)

It could not be the car engine noise because 20 minutes would be when xh left the office and the dog would know even when exh got a taxi home or a lift from someone else.

The dog would move to this spot at about the time exh was leaving to go home.

My in laws were burgled at least 15 years ago (I can't remember when as it was before I knew them) and my MIL had her wedding and engagement ring stolen as she takes them off every night and often swaps them for other rings depending on her outfit. They were very unusal rings, plain gold bands with markiings on them sort of like tree bark. They were stolen from their house in Northern Ireland. Last time they were in Aberdeen they were looking in the window of a random jewllers shop (not one on the high street just one they came across on a wander about) and she saw a ring exactly like her wedding band that was stolen. Even the jeweller commented on how rare a ring it was and how he had never seen anything like it. Needless to say she bought it there and then.

We'd all love to know if it is the same ring, sadly there is no way to tell but I like to think it is. Makes a better story that way

I lost my favourite jumper once, last I remember wearing it was to the school fashion show. I can't imagine I'd have left without it as it was late at night and it never turned up in the lost and found, no idea what happened to it.

Fascinating thread. I have a couple to add... DISCLAIMER: am not remotely psychic.

When I first left home, I worked for the NHS and was living in nurses' accommodation on the site of the hospital. There were 20 or so people living there and I knew most of them well. One morning, I woke up and saw a black bird (like a crow or raven) sitting on the tree outside my window and my first thought was 'someone has died'. I got up and went into the kitchen to find the cleaner crying - one of the boys who lived in the house had died in a car crash the night before.

A couple of years ago, a friend of my boyfriend's was telling us that he must remember to buy a card for his friend (who my BF and I had never met) and the friend's girlfriend but that he couldn't remember what the friend's girlfriend was called. I randomly just went, 'is it Maria?', and it was!

I was telling my colleague about this random coincidence at work the next day and we were joking around that I must be psychic. She challenged me to guess her father's first name. All I knew about this man was that he was in his fifties and from Mauritius. I said the first name that popped into my head, which was Lakshmi (no idea why - Lakshmi is a girls' name) and my colleague was stunned. The father's name was in fact Laxman... but his twin sister's name was Lakshmi!

I'd be so tempted to pop round to borrow an onion or take them an American style welcome basket, just cos I am so nosy. .

I honestly have so many mysteries that I think I don't even remember them any more. My life feels sort of inexplicable in so many ways.

What happened to Clare R from Northampton way? Last I heard she was joining the Navy, I'd love to know how she is.

Where is my daughter's blue blankie?

Where are various pieces of sentimental jewelery?

Ok, that does it. I thought it might just be my imagination going wild but clearly others would imagine scenarios like I can! I will call on Tuesday (procrastinating but I expect the police want their quiet bank holidays like everyone else). I will report back if I hear anything. I don't know what I expect them to do, though. They can hardly force their way in, can they? They simply don't have any grounds for that beyond witnesses hearing a cry for help a month ago... (and the fact that the curtains are never opened which could be for all sorts of reasons - we had a cannabis farm down the other end of my street a few years back which also kept the curtains drawn (and tinfoil on the back windows)).

yes call the police and say you are worried. it could be someone held against there will.